Virgin Media TiVo is driving more consumption of PayTV programming.
TiVo customers are 23% more likely to watch a PayTV suggestion than a
free TV suggestion. Suggesting that TiVo is unlocking content discovery.

The other great thing about Virgin Media TiVo is it’s dedicated,
over-the-top connection, allowing our customers access to content and
applications outside of our TV world garden. Unlike in a DSL garden,
the bandwidth this connection uses will not impede the bandwidth other
devices are using at the same time.

Virgin Media TiVo is a superior differentiated product and our
customers are loving the features. The key customer satisfaction
ratings, which we measure through promoter score, or MPS, are 24% higher
than the non-TiVo customers. That’s our critical mass. This is why
we’re offering TiVo as standard in our new collections. It’s the future
of TV being delivered now and we will continue to improve and enhance
service.

....TiVo continues to sell very
strongly. We had 242,000 net adds in the quarter. This is despite a
price increase from £3 to £5 at the end of February. Remember, we’ve
only been advertising this service for three quarters now and we have
already penetrated 18% of our entire TV base. Over 40% of TiVo gross
adds in the quarter were new to Virgin Media TV.

There's been a lot of new apps appearing on the Virgin Media TiVo platform recently. Most of these have been promotional apps for mobile phones and certain TV channels/content (sorry, no Lovefilm or Netflix yet). But one of the new apps (or rather, an update of an existing one) has been for YouTube.

The new app is much improved over the old versions and finally allows you to login to your YouTube account (which is far easier than you'll expect) and view your subscriptions and playlists, subject of course, to content restrictions.

There's room for improvement here. For instance, you can't watch content which you'll flagged as 'watch later', and the subscriptions content is all in one list, and isn't divided into a folder per channel. Still, this is a massive improvement on previous versions of the app, and from my (very limited) testing, the video quality is at least on a par with the Xbox 360 version of the app.

Wednesday, 11 April 2012

We're very happy to announce that BBC Red Button is now available to
Virgin Media TiVo customers. The features available include video news,
full length text articles from the BBC News website and coverage of F1
season that is always up to date and available whenever you want to
watch. Later this year the BBC Sport Red button services will be
extended to cover other major events e.g. Euro 2012, Wimbledon and
Olympics.

If you’re watching any BBC channel, just press the red button on your
TiVo remote. Then arrow up or down to choose iPlayer or the News or
Sports app, then select OK. Or you can select the BBC News or Sports app
from the ‘Apps & Games’ section of your TiVo menu.

The new service is being rolled out to everyone over the next 24 hours, so don't worry if you can't see it yet.